Residential Night Cooling automation with a Raspberry PI

and few other components

The Result

The idea

Night Cooling is a very efficient way to save energy by cooling a house with the colder air at night. Most people don't use it because it requires to manually turn on a Whole House Fan and open windows. Automation mechanisms are available but very expensive.

My project aims to solve the issue by building an inexpensive automation device using a Raspberry PI and a relay board. It has a couple of inside thermometers and an outdoor wireless thermometer. When the outdoor temperature is a few degrees cooler than the inside temp, the relays activate an actuator to open a window and turn on a whole house fan (both modeled with a Lego). It also has an LCD display to show temperatures and set a few options.

Do it yourself!

I'm providing very high level instructions for this project. I'm planning to add more detail later. Sorry!!

The connection of the relay board was trial and error. What worked for me was: Connect the Gnd pin to a Gnd pin on the PI. Connect the VCC pin to a +5v pin on the PI. Connect IN1..4 to some free GPIO's. Leave the jumper JD-VCC - VCC connected.

Step 5:

It order to use it in the real world you should install the raspberry PI + LCD on a case.